One Thought

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is one of the best books I’ve read.  Its subject matter–evolution of life on earth–is important.  Its writing is flawless and its points well-argued.  Its conclusions are significant, controversial, and seemingly inescapable.

The Selfish Gene is not for the faint of heart.  Consider the following excerpt from an Amazon.com review of the book:

I wish I could rate this book at 5 stars and 0 stars at the same time. It is a fascinating book, very well-written, and it conveys a real sense of how life works on the biological level, how all sorts of diverse factors interact with each other to create an incredibly complex system (the evolution of life, in this case); it also just as vividly conveys a sense of how scientists come to understand these processes. …

But at the same time, I largely blame “The Selfish Gene” for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade, and part of me wants to rate the book at zero stars for its effect on my life. Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper – trying to believe, but not quite being able to – I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quite a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.

The book renders a God or supreme power of any sort quite superfluous for the purpose of accounting for the way the world is, and the way life is. It accounts for the nature of life, and for human nature, only too well, whereas most religions or spiritual outlooks raise problems that have to be got around. It presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature, and makes life seem utterly pointless; yet I cannot present any arguments to refute its point of view. I still try to have some kind of spiritual outlook, but it is definitely battered, and I have not yet overcome the effects of this book on me.

I don’t share the reviewer’s pessimism, but I’ll get to that later.  Some background is necessary first.

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University.  The Selfish Gene, his first book, was published in 1976.  It has since become a classic of popular science literature.  I’m not a scientist and I can’t critique the scientific accuracy of Dawkins’s book, but I don’t need to: The Selfish Gene has been scrutinized for decades, and it has emerged mostly unscathed.

Though it does contain background material, The Selfish Gene is not an evolution text.  Dawkins’s goal with the book is primarily to argue for a gene-based, rather than an organism- or group-based, view of evolution.  He sets out to refute the theory of “group selection,” which had been popular prior to the 1970s.  According to group selection, traits can spread in a population if they benefit groups, even if they are detrimental (evolutionary-fitness-wise) to individuals.  So, for example, group selection implies that a trait for disinterested altruism can spread if groups of altruists are better off than groups of non-altruists.

Dawkins argues that genes, not organisms or groups, are the fundamental unit of evolution.  He terms genes “selfish,” a word he gives a technical meaning.  A “selfish” unit of evolution is one that is selected for–that is copied through the generations–in a Darwinian selection process.  A “successful” selfish unit produces many copies of itself; an unsuccessful one disappears.  Dawkins does not mean, of course, that genes themselves “are” selfish.  Rather he means that they affect the organisms containing them as if they are.  Their effects suggest a selfish disposition.

Genes are passed on based only on their ability to influence organisms to pass them on.  Their benefit to particular organisms or groups is relevant only insofar as it aids their own selfish interest.  Genes must be selfish, as only those most effective at replicating themselves stick around.  The “unselfish” ones all die out.

Genes are “replicators”–they create identical copies of themselves.  Organisms are not–they pass only their genes to the next generation.  Dawkins provides a possible story of the origin of life: in it, primitive replicators emerged in the primordial soup that was earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago.  These replicators were stable configurations of molecules that, through the laws of physics and chemistry, caused like configurations to be created around them.  The copying process occasionally made mistakes, which led to a diversity of replicators.  Because the replicators competed for finite resources (molecules), natural selection favored the ones that were best able to survive and reproduce.  More-stable arrangements–and arrangements capable of decreasing rivals’ stability–were favored.  As time progressed, offensive and defensive strategies became increasingly sophisticated, and the molecular arrangements became increasingly complex.

Eventually the replicators “learned” to build bodies for themselves.  Dawkins suggests that a particular strain may have “discovered” (through a mutation) how to build a wall of protein around itself.  He terms these bodies “survival machines.”  Survival machines helped the replicators to move around, to defend themselves, and to reproduce.  As the replicators grew more complex, so did their survival machines.  The living things we now know–amoebas, worms, trees, raccoons, humans–are all survival machines.  The DNA contained in every cell is the medium for genes, which are the replicators.  We are their survival machines.

So ends chapter two of The Selfish Gene.  Dawkins spends most of the rest of the book elaborating on his argument and demonstrating its explanatory power in specific cases.  He covers his bases well and responds to the obvious objections to his theory.  I couldn’t possibly do justice to the finer points of his argument in this review, and I won’t try.  Instead I will briefly cover a few of the points I found most interesting.

Dawkins’s dismissal of group selection, which I mentioned earlier, rests largely on the concept of evolutionary stability.  A behavior pattern (“strategy”) that is prevalent in a population is evolutionarily stable if it cannot be displaced by an upstart strategy.  Strategies for disinterested altruism–which group selection suggests could develop–are not evolutionarily stable.  I’ll illustrate with an example.  Say that a gene “for” sitting on whatever eggs lie around is prevalent in a bird population.  As long as all the members of the population possess this gene, all is well: all eggs will get sat on.  However, if a mutant bird that sits on no eggs enters the population, its genes will spread rapidly: most of its eggs will get sat on (by the altruists), and it will be free to gather food and lay more.  A strategy for sitting on whatever eggs lie around thus is not evolutionarily stable.  (A strategy for sitting on no eggs isn’t stable either.)  As Dawkins shows, a strategy for sitting on only one’s own eggs is stable.

Genes are in competition with one another.  They “want” to propagate more of their own kind, which means that organisms with similar genes tend to have similar interests and organisms with different genes tend to have different interests.  Close relatives, who share many genes in common, tend to have closely-related interests.  Because parents pass half of their genes to their children, parental care isn’t altruism at the gene level–genes have much to gain from influencing organisms to aid others containing them.  Because parents and children do differ genetically, however, their relationship is not purely cooperative.  You’d expect children to “exploit” their parents to a degree–for example, by pretending to be more hungry than they actually are–and such behavior is in fact present in nature.

Dawkins has much to say on the relationship between the sexes.  He defines “males” as organisms with small and numerous sex cells (i.e., sperm) and “females” as organisms with large and few sex cells (i.e., eggs).  Because sperm can be produced cheaply and in great number, male investment in child bearing is low.  Female investment, however, is significant: a large egg must be produced, and a long gestation period may be involved.  This discrepancy leads to differences in male and female strategies regarding sex.  Because males’ genes stand to gain (and lose) more from competition, males are more likely to behave like high-stakes gamblers.  In polygamous species, they fight, sometimes to the death, for females.  The winners’ genes are spread to many offspring, and the losers’ genes are spread to none.  Because females’ reproductive rate is fixed by their ability to produce eggs, they stand to gain less from competition.  They have more to gain from being picky in their choice of mates, and all sorts of female mate-selection strategies have developed as a result.

Before ending, I want to say a bit about the implications of Dawkins’s book.  The reviewer I quoted earlier states that The Selfish Gene presents an “appallingly pessimistic view of human nature, and makes life seem utterly pointless.”  I disagree.  First, as Dawkins points out, our behavior is only partially determined by our genes.  We are self-aware, rational beings, which means we can question the proclivities our genes give us.  We can even “rebel” against them.  Dawkins uses contraception as a simple example–non-reproductive sex certainly isn’t in our genes’ interest.  More importantly, we can choose to behave as true altruists.  We aren’t compelled to obey our genes’ selfish dictates.

Life is only pointless if we think it is.  We can create meaning as individuals and as a species.  How we got here is irrelevant; we now have the power to direct our own destiny.  I strongly recommend The Selfish Gene to anyone who wants to better understand their place in the universe.

When I first encountered Steve Pavlina’s website “Personal Development for Smart People” a couple years ago, I was immediately impressed with the quality of its content.  Steve’s articles–which have titles like “The Courage to Live Consciously,” “Cultivating Burning Desire,” and “Whatever You Fear, You Must Face“–are well-written, insightful, and often motivating.  Yes, they can be sappy and melodramatic, but they are far better than the junk usually found in personal development books.  Steve’s website is a great resource, and its success is well-deserved.

That said, I was a little disappointed by Steve’s recent book, which is titled after his site.  Steve is ambitious in his book’s scope: he wants to define the “core principles” of personal growth, the principles on which all successful growth efforts are based.  There exist self-help books on a broad range of topics–personal finance, career choice, relationships, and so on–and Steve wants his book to subsume all of them.  His thesis is that all effective personal growth techniques are based on a few core principles.  If you apply these principles to your life, he thinks, the more-specific techniques presented in other books will come naturally.

Steve’s presentation is clear and well-thought-out.  I like his core principles, which are named Truth, Love, and Power.  Truth is seeing and accepting things as they are, Love is engaging fully and openly with the world, and Power is consciously effecting change.  I also like Steve’s scientific approach: he requires that his principles be universal, complete, irreducible, congruent, and practical.  And I think Steve is probably right that his principles underlie most, if not all, effective personal growth efforts.

So why did I find PDFSP a little disappointing?  Maybe I just had high expectations.  And, admittedly, I’ve read enough of Steve’s articles that it’s hard for me to judge his book on its own merits.  But I do think it could have been quite a bit better.

First there’s its organization.  PDFSP feels overly-structured and overly-segmented.  I suspect this organization came from Steve’s desire to be systematic–and perhaps to make writing it straightforward–but the result is often tedious, predictable, and repetitive.  The first seven chapters are devoted to the three core principles and four secondary principles that are supposed to derive from them.  A chapter is devoted to each principle, and each chapter is further sectioned off into independent discussions of “terms” that Steve associates with that principle.  For example, in the Truth chapter, there are sections on “perception,” “prediction,” “accuracy,” “acceptance,” and “self-awareness.”  This kind of structure is tedious.  I would have preferred a more-lively take on the principles.

Worse still is the structure of the later “application” chapters, which apply the principles to the usual self-help topics: money, career choice, relationships, and so on.  Each of these chapters is sectioned off into a separate discussion of how its topic relates to each of the primary and secondary principles.  So, in the money chapter, we get sections on “Money and Truth,” “Money and Love,” “Money and Power,” and so on.  Each of the six application chapters is like this, and they account for almost half of the book.  It’s not surprising that this repetition of structure leads to repetition of ideas.  For example, when discussing Oneness, one of his secondary principles, Steve repeats his view that we are all “individual cells of the same body” over and over again.

Steve’s simple, exuberant, and almost-naive writing style may be off-putting to more-skeptical readers.  This style, combined with the general abstractness of PDFSP, makes it a bit hard to relate to him as a person.  Though Steve does describe a few painful experiences from his past, his explanations feel detached and overly analytical.  I only mention this because, in a personal development book especially, it’s nice to feel a personal connection to the author.

All right, enough of the negative.  There’s a lot of great advice in PDFSP.  I like Steve’s suggestion to rate the parts of your life–career, relationships, etc.–numerically from 1 to 10.  If you give something a “decent” score like “7,”  chances are you’re more dissatisfied with it than you think.  To make his point, Steve says that a “7″ score is really a “1.”

I like (love?) Steve’s view on love.  Steve sees love as a form of connection and as a way of engaging with the world.  For example, he suggests that, instead of seeing yourself as inherently separate from the people around you, you assume you’re already connected to them.  Rather than assuming that connections take a long time to create, he suggests you assume they already exist (“Instead of having to break the ice with someone, assume that there is no ice.”).  Such an attitude will yield in-kind responses from others and fast friendships, Steve claims.  I believe him.

Steve has good advice on making lifestyle changes.  For example, he suggests running “30-day trials” to evaluate new habits.  The idea is to try something new without actually committing to it.  If a change is good, it shouldn’t be difficult to keep going with it after the 30 days are up.  Steve himself has done interesting trials of things like polyphasic sleep and a raw food diet and has posted the results on his website.

In general PDFSP contains a lot of great advice, whether it be on facing fears or on time management.  And I love Steve’s attempt to break personal development down into a few core principles–he’s largely successful, in my opinion.  However, I can’t offer an unqualified endorsement of his book.  Its overly-formal structure is boring and repetitious, and its simplistic exuberance can take some getting used to.  If the good stuff I’ve mentioned sounds interesting to you and the bad stuff doesn’t sound too bad, it’s worth a look.

There is good stuff in Timothy Ferriss’s anti-job self-help book The 4-Hour Workweek.  Unfortunately, it’s drowned out by the oceans of bad and useless advice that pervade much of the book.  But let’s start with the good.  The first two sections of T4HWW make some very valid points.  Ferriss argues that, for most, the ideal life is much cheaper than it might seem.  He rails against the “deferred life plan”–working a decade (or three) doing something you don’t like to save money for retirement, where you’ll (supposedly) do what you’ve always wanted.  Ferriss gives some good time-management advice as well.  I liked his emphasis on thinking about what you are doing and dropping the things that aren’t important.  That may sound obvious, but many people confuse busyness with productivity.  I liked Ferriss’s “comfort challenges,” which are designed to get readers accustomed to facing their fears.  Ferriss gives some good advice on quitting a bad job, and he might inspire some to do just that.

Now for the bad.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad.  Ferriss projects an overconfidence and arrogance that is sometimes-patronizing and often-irritating (I don’t need to be told that a chapter will “put [me] on the real breakfast of champions”).  Many of his claims are far-fetched.  For example, he confidently states that, by reading his chapter on time management, you will experience “an increase in personal productivity between 100 and 500%.”  Blech.

It’s glaringly obvious that Ferriss is a style-over-substance kind of guy.  He begins T4HWW with a litany of his accomplishments: he’s been a “no-holds-barred cage fighter,” a “Princeton University guest lecturer,” a “Glycemic Index researcher,” an “MTV break-dancer,” a “political asylum activist,” a “TV host in Thailand,” and so on.  The legitimacy of these credentials is unclear, and, perhaps tellingly, Ferriss later gives readers advice on how to embellish their own resumes.  It’s clear that looking good on paper is very important to Ferriss.  Did he write this book to help readers, or merely to add another bullet point to his resume?

If Ferriss’s advice were good, that question might not matter (much).  But most of it isn’t.  The second part of T4HWW–the most-practical, most-specific part–is at its core a get-rich-quick scheme.  Ferriss advises readers to design a product–whatever crap is likely to make money, it seems–and then to have third parties handle the manufacturing, order fulfillment, and customer service.  The idea is to sit back, do (almost) nothing, and watch the checks come in.

Ferriss’s cynicism is alarming.  He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility of making money in a fun and meaningful way, and he certainly doesn’t give advice in that vein.  The guiding principle of T4HWW is to do what it takes to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible.  Ferriss’s own business is a shining example of this philosophy: he sells a sports supplement (“the world’s first neural accelerator”!) on a website replete with testimonials, “110% guarantees,” and other infomercial-esque gimmicks.  I’ll let you decide how much value you think his business is adding.

So Ferriss is cynical, but does his approach work?  I would guess that, for most people, the answer is no.  Many of Ferriss’s business ideas exploit easily-duplicable arbitrage opportunities.  In chapter 9, Ferriss describes his friend Doug, who resells sound effects libraries on the internet.  Well, “resells” is too strong a word: Doug merely forwards orders to the manufacturers, who then ship directly to his customers.  In another example, Ferriss describes a man who ships shirts from France to the U.S., where he sells them at a (large) profit.

Is it possible to make a lot of money with such an approach?  Yes.  Is it likely?  I doubt it.  If you’re as wily as Ferriss, you might find something that works–but, then again, you could probably also find success in a more-legitimate (and probably more-enjoyable) pursuit.

While I did like Ferriss’s thoughts on handling a bad job, his advice on working remotely is not applicable to the many–if not most–who don’t sit in front of a computer all day.  And even if you’re a computer jockey, I doubt his approach is all it’s cracked up to be.  In a hypothetical example, Ferriss describes a man who works remotely (on his computer) while in Munich during Oktoberfest.  The thing is, Ferriss suggests being substantially more productive outside the office to show your boss that working remotely makes good business sense.  Trying to be extra-productive during Oktoberfest is not my idea of a good time.

I could go on, but I won’t.  Though I did like parts of T4HWW, there’s a lot to dislike about Ferriss’s book.  It would have been better without the 100-page get-rich-quick scheme.  (And had Ferriss toned things down a bit, but let’s not get greedy.)  Nonetheless, there is good content, and the good parts might have a meaningful impact on the right reader. I don’t recommend this book, but you could certainly do worse.

In God’s Debris, Dilbert-creator Scott Adams lays out what he calls a “thought experiment.” Adams frames the meat of his book–a long conversation–in a meager plotline: A delivery man comes to a house one day, gets no response to his knock, steps inside, and is greeted by an old man. The two have a long conversation that covers physics, metaphysics, God’s will, free will, religion, evolution, extra-sensory perception, and motivational psychology (not to mention the kitchen sink). The old man is presented as an oracle (of sorts), and the delivery man is there mainly to keep him talking.

Adams disavows the beliefs presented in God’s Debris, stating that the “thought experiment” is to discover where the old man goes wrong–where his beliefs make leaps that defy logic. I have a couple problems with this approach. First, Adams’ unwillingness to stand behind any of the views he presents feels like a cop-out–one wonders if he wrote the book, saw the obvious flaws in his (the old man’s) arguments, and then decided to publish it anyway with the disclaimer. I’m wary of an author who won’t put himself on the line.

Second, I don’t find Adams’ thought experiment particularly interesting. One should read any work skeptically, and a work making metaphysical claims deserves an especially close look. Would Adams’ thought experiment have been any different had he presented the old man’s views as his own? No–we would still read his work skeptically. Adams claims that the old man’s philosophy stems from the “skeptic’s creed”–that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one–but he gives no justification for this claim. It’s not at all clear that the explanations presented are simpler than the alternatives. Thus, the fact that the old man’s arguments are flawed says little about the validity of the skeptic’s creed.

The philosophy of God’s Debris does have its merits. The old man’s explanation of the universe’s origin, for instance, was novel to me. In short, the old man thinks that an all-powerful god–one he assumes exists–would find nothing challenging other than the prospect of destroying itself. The old man posits that this god did destroy itself in an explosion that created the universe. The universe is composed of tiny particles–”god’s dust”–whose motion is governed by “probability.” Though this probability is not explained very well, the old man thinks that it captures god’s will–events that god wants to happen are more likely to occur. According to the old man, god is using probability to rebuild itself.

If you’ve read much philosophy, you’re probably familiar with much of the ground God’s Debris covers. The old man presents oft-repeated arguments against “free will,” for example. He also pokes holes in science, which, he points out, makes its own metaphysical assumptions. To Adams’ credit, his presentation is straightforward. Too many philosophers get bogged down in jargon and incomprehensible sentence structures, and I commend Adams for keeping things simple.

Is God’s Debris worth reading? If you are new to the topics it presents, I think so. It will get you thinking about some interesting questions. The philosopher in me can’t help but wish that Adams had taken his task more seriously and presented arguments that he could stand behind. Nevertheless, the book does present difficult ideas straightforwardly, and some of its content was new to me.